The invention relates to message processing and more particularly to the use of schema information in the processing of a message.
It is known for business applications to use web services, messaging etc. to communicate with one another over an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). For example, a certain class of applications may send messages to each other using messaging systems, which are connected together via the bus. In this way, one application connected to one messaging system may talk to a different application connected to another messaging system.
Applications interacting across an ESB commonly use messages such as XML messages to communicate with one another. Messages are normally described by type definitions (schema) that define the message structure and allowable content. Message type definitions may include weakly-typed fields, where the actual message contents may vary and more than one definition may apply for that part of the message. For XML messages and in some other cases, XML Schema provides the type definition, and weakly-typed fields are most commonly encountered where the “any”, “anyType”, or “anySimpleType” constructs are used. These are constructs that are well known in the art.
Tasks such as viewing message structure, for example, in order to define transformations between one message type and another usually depend upon a visualization of the message structure, which is derived directly from the message type definition. Visualizing the content of weakly-typed fields is difficult, because their content structure is variable, and the XML Schema or other type information does not describe the content fully. In these situations, the result is an incomplete visualization of limited assistance for defining how these messages should be handled, and the end user must often write custom logic to handle the weakly-typed content.